Digimon Story: Cyber Sleuth is another Digimon game brought out late 2015 in Japan but has recently come across the pond after receiving great amount of success for a series that has been known to be masked by Pokémon games throughout its 15 years of running.

For those with little knowledge of Digimon twill be a pleasant introduction for you with many elements of the game having to be based around part luck and part knowledge. One thing I firmly enjoyed about this game though was they went back to the original three sagas, these involved the Original Digimon, Armour Digivolve and Digi-Modify series which are my preferred series compared to Fusion and various other ones I wish didn’t happen.

I will put a small note here saying I have played this on the PS4 - I've been informed there is little to no difference on the game on the Vita so here we go!

In my review I will touch upon key points of the game with mechanics, system design and also I’ll try to avoid the spoilers! Keep your eyes peeled people! It’s time to Digivolve into this!

As the game starts you are given the choice of being Male or Female character which I enjoy the element of but I must admit, the two don’t seem very different from one another and minus a couple of lines of dialog there is no change in how other NPCs reaction to you, something I think is a nice element.

The game is a rather pleasant opening, it starts off very easily and I felt that, even though I had some knowledge of Digimon I didn’t need to tap into this to begin with picking Digimon to fight with.

The game itself is a very good Japanese RPG – As such it is ‘text only’ English whilst the Japanese voice acting is still being used. I won’t lie, this annoyed me in parts. There are a few, if not many, points where the game will randomly give you one to three lines of Voice acting only then to slam you with annoying repeating background music and a wall of text to read.

Now, I know this might seem a bit picky but there were a few (at least five that I’ve counted so far) where the translation was wrong on the text format, meaning that some sentences I had to re-read three to four times in order to figure out where it had gone wrong. It kind of made me feel that Bandi just put the game through a translation matrix and didn’t care to think about it.

And then there is one voice actor that ruined it for me and I skipped all of her lines, but she is a key part to the story so I’ll hold off on that one.

HOWEVER the character development on the other hand is a classic Japanese style of great building and stunning twists, definitely something I’ve enjoyed watching as the protagonist of the game.

Battle Mode

With most JRPGs there is a lot about being bonds, sticking it out and… grinding.

This is nothing different in that element. The Battle mechanics are broken down into a few very simple things: Attack, Skill, Guard, Item and Change.

To anyone thinking of buying this game I will say straight up – DO NOT GET COMFY WITH THE SAME THREE DIGIMON – I learned this the hard way and my lord did I have to grind heavily for it. As you’ll find out throughout the game there are so many twists and turns and certain Digimon do better damage to others and then there is a tone of other elements to it! But that comes later.

Attacking is a very straight forward ‘basic’ move that can do little to massive damage depending on how you build up your Digimon. Skill is the ‘MP’ (or in this SP – Skill Power) to most games. You can only use a certain amount of them depending on how much SP you have. So becareful - but luckily when you level up it restores everything to full, I’ve used that in more than one situation to save my bacon!

Guard is the ‘I’m defending, please don’t hurt me’ kind of thing and it does come in handy when you are facing off against a Digimon with an UBER attack that hurts like a stick to the eye if you don’t have the right abilities.

Items is pretty straight forward, healing items, SP restore, revive and what not all play good rolls in this game, even more so when you get to later stages – Trust me and keep hold of those items, a few Yen is not worth you dying and restarting.

Change is a nice little element to the game, because you can (in theory) get up to 11 Digimon in your team you can swap out your main three for others, just in case you are having a bad day going up against some Digimon, have the other types really helps!

As you progress through the game you’ll start seeing different Digimon around and you’ll want them, trust me, you will… This is where the next feature comes in….

The ‘Capture’ method I found very enjoyable and it showed a lot of promise. You would have to ‘analyse’ the Digimon you were wanting to capture a number of times, they would vary depending on what ‘Class’ of Digimon you had, the stronger the Class of the Digimon the more you had to analyse it before you could ‘summon’ it yourself.

Now, some of you are thinking “Wait, I can only have 11 Digimon at once?”

OH no! Oh no, no, no! You can get up too (so far for me) 61 Digimon at once, there is the ‘Digimon Islands’ you will unlock more as you progress through but you get one to start you off which will, slowly, train up your idle Digimon to gain levels and progress but they will suffer at the fact they have not spent time with you so their ‘Bond’ or in this case ‘CAM’ will not change unless you force feed them food, because who doesn’t grow fond of people forcing them to eat?

Story Mode

The main story begins around the three hackers, yourself and two others who are greeted by a ‘hacker’ in an online chat room. You are told to come to EDEN or else you will be HACKED – Apparently being Hacked is a very scary thing now-a-days for the Digital people.

EDEN is a Virtual Reality where people can chat, meet and interact with each other. The game very quickly reveals itself to be much more than just a VR gone wrong when the main character has something happen to him. It’s a creature that is not Digimon nor Human attacks him and things go from casual Tea-cup ride to Vertical Dropping Roller-coaster! Buckle up kids! This ride is one that throws you everywhere and just when you think things go well… HA! PLOT TWIST!!!!!

Now, with these in mind I’ve got to say this is one of those games that really has impressed me. I’ve missed out on the basic RPG elements without anything fancy but I’ve really enjoyed it as a game. I’ve had a lot of trial and errors to make the New Game+ to be something really enjoyable!

Seriously, for those who enjoy a good RPG this is one to keep an eye on!

Watch some Youtube play throughs and see if you dig it, but if you have a Vita, get it on there – Truly is a great pocket game!